It’s an absolute scandal: During tough economic times, a Virginia government employee has been caught red-handed misspending public funds to advance his political agenda on climate change.

If you think the allusion here is to former University of Virginia climate researcher Michael Mann, the author of the famous hockey stick graph on atmospheric temperatures and a favorite butt of climate-skeptic attacks, think again. Despite a hard-nosed corruption investigation led by Virginia Attorney General (and prominent climate denier) Ken Cuccinelli, every judicial body to examine the Mann case thus far, including several Virginia courts, the National Science Foundation [PDF], and a Penn State ethics panel, has rejected allegations that the professor fraudulently obtained public research dollars.

Unlike the case against Michael Mann, this scandal involves indisputable evidence of tax-dollar abuse. So, given his aggressiveness in the Mann case, how did Cuccinelli manage to let this more clear-cut case slip through the cracks?

Well, because people don’t tend to sue themselves, as a rule.

That’s right: When it comes to misusing public funds vis-à-vis climate change, no one is as blatantly culpable as Cuccinelli. For proof, we don’t have to look any further than his relentless prosecution of Mann. Despite the overwhelming lack of justification for the legal action, the attorney general continues to consume the resources of his office and the court system to perpetuate what is for all intents and purposes a personal ideological crusade against the climate scientist (and consequently climate science). And it isn’t just academics, climatologists, and voices on the left who have cried foul on Cuccinelli here. As New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin pointed out back in 2010, Cuccinelli has even caught flak from other prominent climate deniers such as Chip Knappenberger, who has warned of the chilling effect the attorney general’s “witch hunt” could have on university research work. But such wide-ranging rejections of his campaign against Mann haven’t deterred Cuccinelli in the least. After getting shot down in the lower courts, he’s now taken the case all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court, which, according to a recent Virginia Times Dispatch article, is expected to hand down a decision by March.

In his state of the commonwealth address earlier this month, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell boasted of his administration’s meticulous fiscal responsibility, and efforts to slash state spending over the past several years. Along the way, the government had to make some difficult belt-tightening decisions, from cutting public sector jobs, to slashing funding to the public schools.

Cuccinelli’s climate crusade is a hypocritical contradiction of the governor’s claim to be running a fiscally responsible government. Given the tough times, there’s a wide variety of ways Virginia tax dollars could be much more responsibly employed: from paying teachers and troopers, to investing in schools and public infrastructure, to energy development, retirement benefits, unemployment assistance, and on and on. Moreover, in light of Virginia’s particular vulnerability to climate change, Cuccinelli’s waste of public funds in an attempt to fuel climate denial is all the more reprehensible. Instead of throwing away those dollars on this absurd climate witch hunt, the government might consider using the money to act on the findings of its own climate change commission, which, in a 2008 report, found that the commercially important “Hampton Roads region is considered to be the second most populated region at risk from sea level and related storm damage after the New Orleans region.”

So forget “Climategate”; in Virginia, the real scandal is “Cuccinelli-gate.” Virginians deserve better than what they’re getting from their attorney general, and should flood his office with messages to let him know.

Filed under: Article]]>http://grist.org/article/taxpayer-dollars-squandered-in-virginia-climate-scandal/feed/0ken-cuccinelli-flickr-gage-skidmoreken-cuccinelli-flickr-gage-skidmoreMr. Obama: XL + Tar Sands = Bad Political Equationhttp://grist.org/article/mr-obama-xl-tar-sands-bad-political-equation/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/mr-obama-xl-tar-sands-bad-political-equation/#commentsTue, 23 Aug 2011 03:10:56 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=47321]]>Three years ago, I spent a number of weekends going door to door in Virginia urging people to vote for our President. In that campaign I found a sense of pride, a sense of excitement, a sense of energizing virtue.

This weekend, I spent a good chunk of time training to do civil disobedience at President Obama’s door in the desperate hope that he’ll fulfill the promise that drove me onto the streets for him in 2008. And in so doing I’ve found the same sense of pride, the same excitement, and the same energizing sense of virtue that I did three years back.

And just like in 2008, when I hit the streets today to fight for a brighter future, I was wearing an “Obama 08” button on my shirt. I didn’t wear it out of a sense of irony. I wore it for the same reason I wore it before: out of a sense of hope. Out of a sense of hope that this intelligent, idealistic man might actually take the reins of public power and stand up for the true national interest, stand up for a tomorrow that isn’t ruined and ravaged by the greed of fossil fuel companies.

Today I asked President Obama to give me a reason to knock on doors for him again next year. Today I asked him to use the authority of his office to save the future from the massive, climate obliterating carbon bomb that’s bound to go off if the oil industry gets the go ahead to build the Keystone XL pipeline – the massive, 1700 mile fuse linking U.S. oil refineries to the catastrophic power of the Canadian oil sands. The power is in his hands. He doesn’t need Congress and he doesn’t need the courts; he just needs the courage to stand behind his convictions.

It’s a crying shame that it had to come to this. It’s a shame that we’ve reached a situation where every-day political activists like myself and thousands of others like me have found it necessary to break the law and face arrest in order to push this president to do what he promised to do, what he must do, what he knows is the right thing, the only thing to do. How is is possible that we should have to go to such dramatic lengths to stop this President from making the stupidest and most destructive decision for the climate that any president could ever make – much less one who promised to “roll back the specter of a warming planet”?

The answer is simple: bad political calculus. A calculus that ignores some very important variables like me and the hordes of committed grassroots activists who are ready to lay it on the line in the name of climate justice. A calculus he’s been relying on for the past several years that tells him its better move to the right than to do what’s right, and consequently alienate the hardcore base of idealistic, energetic people who were so vital in propelling him to office.

Nothing speaks to the flaws of that calculus better than the tar sands protests. If the president’s got half the brains I think he has, he should be able to realize that. And if it’s not clear to him by now, after the next dozen days and hundreds more arrests at his doorstep one could only hope that it would be crystal clear that the only political equation that will result in the best solution for him, for his reelection hopes, for our economy and for our global future is an equation where the variables X and L are firmly cancelled out.

Filed under: Article]]>http://grist.org/article/mr-obama-xl-tar-sands-bad-political-equation/feed/0Koch brothers declare war on offshore windhttp://grist.org/wind-power/2011-07-14-koch-brothers-declare-war-on-offshore-wind/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/wind-power/2011-07-14-koch-brothers-declare-war-on-offshore-wind/#commentsSat, 16 Jul 2011 00:07:20 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-07-14-koch-brothers-declare-war-on-offshore-wind/]]>The Koch brothers have now turned their firepower against offshore wind.The war over America’s coastal-energy future has officially begun, and the result could determine whether we see wind turbines or catastrophic oil spills along our coastlines in coming years.

The opening salvo came in early July, when everyone’s favorite climate-hating, fossil-fuel-loving industrialist villains, the Koch brothers, released a so-called “cost-benefit analysis” of New Jersey offshore wind development plans through their front group Americans for Prosperity.

The focus on New Jersey is no big surprise. Fresh off their recent success in manipulating the state’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie into backing out of the Northeastern cap-and-trade system known as RGGI, the brothers grim are honing in on what they see as a weak spot in the clean-energy movement’s eastern front. Hoping to score a knockout blow, the duo have packed their offshore wind “analysis” with distortions.

Topping the report’s list of misrepresented facts are the jobs benefits. In fact, forget about misrepresentation; the report actually failed to represent those benefits altogether. Considering the impressive job-creation numbers cited in a range of other studies on offshore wind [PDF], it’s hard to imagine how any analysis that wasn’t commissioned as an intentional piece of fiction could have made such a glaring omission. Indeed, a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that the 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind power New Jersey is planning to build could result in nearly 5,000 construction and maintenance jobs. Adding to the imbalance of the Kochs’ equations, their report completely discounts wind power’s benefit as a relief valve against foreign-oil dependence or New Jersey’s need to import electricity from other states.

Of course, this parade of misinformation should come as little surprise considering the track record of the key Koch crony in the Garden State: AFP New Jersey chapter director and Tea Party high priest Steve Lonegan. A longtime extreme-right gadfly of the New Jersey political scene, Lonegan earned his Koch-worthy credentials publishing false accusations about political opponents during his time as mayor of Bogota, N.J., and has been accused of violating state election laws and defrauding taxpayers in a 2008 run for governor. What’s more, as chronicled in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Lonegan was the local force behind the “dishonest scare-campaign” that led to Christie’s retreat from RGGI.

With Lonegan leading the offensive, it’s clear the Kochs are planning to make the fight over New Jersey’s coasts a particularly ugly and bruising one. The situation also bodes ominously for other states up and down the Mid-Atlantic Bight that are considering wind projects, from Connecticut to North Carolina.

Thankfully, for all the dollars and deceitfulness the Kochs have in their arsenal, their victory is far from assured. As their failed attempt to cut down California’s climate law in 2010 proved, the Kochs can be beaten by a well-organized, grassroots-powered opposition with truth on its side. And that’s exactly what they’re up against in New Jersey and up and down the Mid-Atlantic Bight, where a robust coalition involving everyone from Google to the United Steelworkers to the League of Women Voters is ready to stand up for wind and smack down any BS Lonegan and the Kochs serve up.

Game on, boys. Bring it.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Cleantech, Climate & Energy, Wind Power]]>http://grist.org/wind-power/2011-07-14-koch-brothers-declare-war-on-offshore-wind/feed/0koch-fire-turbine-carousel.jpgKoch bros. breathing fire on wind turbineSmithsonian exhibit connects art to climate advocacyhttp://grist.org/article/2011-01-18-smithsonian-exhibit-connects-art-to-climate-advocacy/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/2011-01-18-smithsonian-exhibit-connects-art-to-climate-advocacy/#commentsWed, 19 Jan 2011 02:02:47 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=42171]]>“(Untitled) St. Louis, 2005″Image: Alexis RockmanWhat role should art play in efforts to fight climate change and inspire people to address it? As the climate movement struggles to regain its bearings and look for new tools to reinvigorate itself after the failures of the 111th Congress, Copenhagen and Cancun, this question may be as relevant as any other that movement leaders and activists are asking themselves, especially given the unique role of art as a political and cultural magnifying glass.

It’s also a question one can’t help but ask after visiting painter Alexis Rockman’s exhibit, “A Fable for Tomorrow”, now showing at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through May 8th, 2011. Many of the works in the exhibit seem to inhabit a zone somewhere between art and activism. They possess an energy that seems to reach out and pull you into the twisted and ruined worlds Rockman has documented and envisioned, before throwing you back into your life with a heightened urge to do something to stop the trajectory of destruction.

Indeed, much of Rockman’s oeuvre reads like a visual indictment against the vast catalog of offenses that humanity has committed against the natural world that we depend upon for survival. Among the particular transgressions Rockman has highlighted with his brush we find genetic engineering, factory farming, and of course, the mother of them all: climate change — a subject which Rockman addresses with particularly unnerving and humbling clairvoyance in his American Icons series. The Icons paintings depict symbols of American power and prestige ultimately undone by an abuse of the very powers that willed them into reality, such as a crumbling Gateway Arch, or the more fanciful, (Untitled) Mt. Rushmore with floodwaters lapping at the chins of the granite presidents. And our incoming freshman class of congressional climate deniers might want to go and check out a small canvass on which the U.S. Capitol Building emerges from an overgrown landscape, draped in a thick blanket of vegetation like the ruins of a Mayan temple.

Reflecting on the importance of Rockman’s work to our awareness of climate change, legendary climate organizer, author and activist Bill McKibben wrote in Orion Magazine that the paintings “complement the new satellite photos showing, for instance, that the North Pole has 20 percent less ice than it did when Apollo sent back those loving shots of our island Earth and we all pretended that we cared.” Yet for all their poltical potentcy, Rockman has a tendency to downplay his paintings’ real world political resonance. While readily admitting that “just about everything we do is political,” when asked if he views his work as a form of activism his response was self deprecating: “Only in the most marginalized sort of way.” As an example, Rockman pointed to his epic 2004 painting, Manifest Destiny — now on display at the Smithsonian exhibit — which depicts the flooded, decaying ruins of a climate-change-ravaged New York City.

“That painting,” he says, “came from desperation that people refused to see the reality of climate change.” With very little public discussion of the crisis, he felt compelled to make a statement about the consequences of our complacency, and he “felt a tremendous relief when Al Gore came in and made An Inconvenient Truth.” By bringing the climate issue to a mass moviegoing audience, Rockman felt that the Academy Award winning documentary, “let him off the hook,” suggesting that political inspiration is a job best left to politicians. He also suggested that film in general might be a better artistic medium for inspiring public action.

Rockman’s deference to film can be seen in his tendency to depict iconic locations as the victims of environmental collapse — a formula that comes right out of Hollywood disaster movies where major landmarks are always the first things to go. And no doubt he’s right that film does have a capacity to reach a larger audience; but that fact shouldn’t be used to discount the unique power of more “rarified” fine art like Rockman’s canvasses. Indeed, seeing those post-apocalyptic images set in frames and hung on the walls of a Smithsonian gallery seemed to imbue them with more gravity and reality than even the very best computer-generated sound and fury Hollywood could conjure.

Some visitors to the exhibit, such as Alan Braddock, agree. An assistant professor of art history at the Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Braddock explained how he has seen firsthand the power that Rockman’s works have to connect his students to the political and cultural issues that they confront. Addressing Rockman from the audience during the question and answer session at an exhibit lecture last week, Braddock insisted on the artist’s role as a force in the realm of political activism, telling him “I think you are the person that can bring [these issues] to a larger audience.”

Following the lecture, Braddock compared the political relevance of Rockman’s paintings to those of Diego Rivera, whose Rockefeller Center mural Man at the Crossroads stirred controversy that provoked its destruction in 1934. “Artists like Rivera were taking a risk and playing with fire, by addressing politically charged subjects,” Braddock said. “Through his work Rockman is playing with another kind of fire, and challenging the status quo. I think it will be interesting to see how his reputation as an important voice grows.”

Following his debut at a forum as prestigious as the Smithsonian, it’s likely that Rockman’s reputation will in fact only continue to grow. And it’s a good thing too. Though a somewhat reluctant player in the political arena, there is little doubt that he remains one of the world’s most inspiring and potentially influential creative voices regarding the environmental crises we are facing.

As those of us daily laboring within the trenches of climate activism know all too well, our movement needs all of the sources of inspiration and creative thinking that we can get. So as we look for new ways to motivate activists into action, we could do a lot worse than encouraging people to visit “A Fable for Tomorrow,” and we can only hope that there will be more of the same to come from Alexis Rockman.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/2011-01-18-smithsonian-exhibit-connects-art-to-climate-advocacy/feed/0gatewayarch-alexisrockman.jpgovergrown Gateway ArchWhy our economy 'required' the Gulf oil spillhttp://grist.org/article/2010-12-22-why-our-economy-required-the-gulf-oil-spill/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/2010-12-22-why-our-economy-required-the-gulf-oil-spill/#commentsWed, 22 Dec 2010 22:42:06 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=41781]]>Earlier this month, environmental and clean energy activists, as well as coastal communities breathed a much needed sigh of relief when the Obama administration reversed last spring’s reckless decision to open up new offshore areas to oil drilling. Now, thankfully, the coastlines of the Pacific, Atlantic and the eastern Gulf will be spared the same fate as the Western Gulf into the foreseeable future. In a year of oil disasters and energy policy failures it’s a much needed cause for celebration. But on the eight month anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill, as we enjoy this rare bit of good news we shouldn’t let ourselves forget that the American offshore oil industry is still growing – over 10,000 wells in the Gulf and counting – and that growth is an imperative that it will stop at nothing to obey.

That should be the major lesson that we take away from the gulf spill. Tougher industry rules are needed, but there is no way to effectively regulate an industry that has grown so large, and that is driven to keep growing and growing. 10,000 wells mean 10,000 opportunities for blow out preventer failings, 10,000 opportunities for human error – 10,000 chances for another catastrophe. And those risks only multiply as the rigs push into deeper and deeper water under the gun of consumer and investor demand for more.

Unfortunately though, as with so many of the other crises caused by capitalism from the recent financial crisis, the popular narrative ignores profound systemic problems to focus on the actions and failings of a few companies or individuals. Public villains like Tony Hayward or the Wall Street bankers allow us to wrap up complex issues in tidy packages and avoid confronting inconvenient truths. Even claims about lax regulatory systems, while true, distract us from the bigger picture.

But if we take just a few steps back, that bigger picture quickly emerges with startling clarity: we see that to end the spills, we need more than regulation; we need to take away the growth imperative. And not only because the industry has grown too big to regulate, but because regulation is a limit that it is systemically designed to circumvent. Just as sharks can never stop moving, under our current economic design, corporations have to grow in order to survive. Stock market speculators won’t tolerate a corporation or an economy that’s simply big enough, or even too big. It has to be ever bigger. Indeed, according to growth economists a “healthy” global economy has to maintain a constant rate of three-percent annual compound growth. In an infinite world where resources aren’t scarce and markets don’t get saturated with surplus dollars, such an approach might work. But we live in a world where resources like oil are rapidly dwindling, and where markets that produce real goods have become so saturated that speculators have few frontiers left where they can keep that three percent ‘healthy’ growth going.

In such a world continued growth depends on the invention of fictions. So with no real markets left that could produce the desired profit margins, Wall Street invented a fictitious market in mortgage assets. Similarly, the oil industry has run out of easily accessible reserves; only it doesn’t have the luxury of creating fictitious ones – though it sometimes tries. Instead, to get bigger, big oil has had to push drilling into ever riskier and costlier environments and invent the fiction that this can be done safely and profitably without cutting corners.

And herein lies the really frightening truth about our growth economy: because fictions are essential to its continuation, the crises those fictions unavoidably create are also essential to its continuation. In other words, oil spills, recessions and high unemployment are necessary evils that we must accept if we want to maintain the fiction of endless growth.

To stop the crises, we have to shift to an economic system that’s based in reality. And, again, it won’t be enough to try to try to limit growth capitalism, since that system is programmed to bulldoze its way through regulatory limits. Even a carbon cap won’t be enough to check the oil companies in a growth economy. Such retail fixes need to be pursued, but they won’t be effective until we’ve committed ourselves to a wholesale shift away from the growth model.

Fortunately, it turns out that the best alternative to the growth fiction – the steady-state economy – won’t just spare us the crises of growth, but help us build the truly prosperous global society that growth has been unable to deliver. As outlined in the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy’s (CASSE) recent report Enough is Enough, the pathway to a steady-state economy will be paved with an array of policies that will benefit us economically, environmentally and socially by dramatically reducing debt, stopping population growth, securing employment, distributing income and wealth, reforming the monetary system and limiting resource use and waste production among other things.

It’s a tall order, no doubt, but even though the odds may seem to be currently stacked against such a wholesale transformation, it turns out that the opportunities to realize it will eventually be handed to us by growth capitalism itself. The basis for such hope was, ironically enough, articulated well by one of the ultimate high priests of growth capitalism, Milton Friedman:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

If there’s one thing that we can count on, it’s that capitalism is sure to hand us another crisis before long. In the meantime, to ensure change, we simply have to do our best to pack the many cracks in the growth edifice with the ideas of a steady state economy. So when that edifice finally collapses under its own weight and we start to sift through the rubble, those bright ideas of the steady state will be lying everywhere, beckoning to be picked up.

Get involved in efforts to promote the steady-state economy by readingEnough is Enough, and signing the CASSE position state
ment.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/2010-12-22-why-our-economy-required-the-gulf-oil-spill/feed/0Plugging the black hole afflicting the U.N. climate talks (and everything else)http://grist.org/article/2010-12-06-plugging-the-black-hole-afflicting-the-un-climate-talks-and/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/2010-12-06-plugging-the-black-hole-afflicting-the-un-climate-talks-and/#commentsTue, 07 Dec 2010 02:15:58 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=41489]]>After the stratospheric buildup and colossal letdown of last year’s major global climate talks in Copenhagen it can be tough to see the promise in this year’s Cancun round of talks. But despite the gloom of low expectations, climate advocates have found a few bright spots on which to center their hopes.

One leading light in the picture is the issue of adaptation funding. Last year, under the so called Copenhagen Accord, developed countries pledged to start shelling out 10 billion dollars a year (and 100 billion annually by 2020) to help the developing world cope with climate impacts and jumpstart their clean energy economies. This year, advocates are hoping for a breakthrough on the institutional mechanisms for financing that adaptation aid.

Given this hope it’s ironic that few issues besides adaptation funding better highlight the one fundamental obstacle to global climate action – that big gaping black hole at the center of the global climate talks that will inevitably devour any progress negotiators may make on the margins until we figure out how to plug it up. It’s the same black hole that has continued to suck the life from countless other vital global efforts from preserving bio-diversity to hitting the UN millennium development goals: Growth capitalism, the gravitational center around which our global civilization currently orbits.

If adaptation funding has typically taken a backseat in global climate talks to other issues like emissions targets or technological development, it stands to reason. Those other issues, while also hindered by growth capitalism, are more easily co-opted into its ideological framework. Both represent potential markets for capitalist profiteering, whereas adaptation funding revolves around a very different set of values. Adaptation means making investments not in the name of profit, but in the name of human welfare and development. It means denying the trickle-down myth of growth economics and focusing existing global wealth with laser like precision on growing the things it’s supposed to grow – not GDP but the real indices of human welfare like health, food security, and environmental integrity.

Moreover, real adaptation assistance is about social and economic justice – i.e. requiring wealthy developed states to take responsibility and pay for the global warming pollution debt they’ve passed on to the developing world. Such a notion doesn’t square with the ideology of growth-capitalist countries like the US, as Washington’s top UN climate negotiator Todd Stern reminded us in Copenhagen last year when he “categorically reject[ed]…the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations” for damages done by US historical emissions.

Indeed the only way to bring adaptation assistance within the rubric of growth capitalism would be to twist it into a way for developed countries to make a profit, say via debt financing facilitated by an institution like the World Bank. But if adaptation assistance means making countries more stable, secure and resilient it’s hard to see how it could be administered by an institution whose policies have historically undermined those very things. Scarily enough, negotiators in Cancun are considering just such an arrangement with the World Bank, prompting protests like the Climate Justice Now network’s “World Bank out of Climate Finance” campaign.

Even if rich countries ratchet up their adaptation commitments to the hundreds of billions required annually and the Cancun talks result in a just financing mechanism, it’s a safe bet that growth capitalism will make short work of those achievements. For proof, one has only to consider how quickly G20 leaders scaled back on their global AIDS funding promises following the recession so they could bail out the banks that caused it. Then there’s the fact that a bigger economy will be even more of a challenge to power cleanly, thus making it harder to stabilize the climate and even more costly to adapt to the impacts.

The bottom line: to have any serious chance of producing a meaningful global climate agreement going forward, the UN climate talks have to recognize and address that big gaping black hole of growth capitalism at their center. For instance, next year’s talks in South Africa should aim to reinvigorate the UN process by including a new working group focusing on finding an economic model that works for the climate like the one recently laid out in the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy’s new report Enough is Enough.

Of course, the scale and scope of talks to reconfigure the global economy extend far beyond the ambit of the UN climate process. Addressing the multiple crises of growth capitalism is the single biggest challenge facing the world today – a challenge that underlies virtually every other major challenge we face from stabilizing the climate, to ending AIDS and poverty and preventing future economic crises. So until we organize global talks to address the growth problem, we should stop scratching our heads and throwing up our hands in frustration as progress stalls and the lights of hope for climate and our other great challenges flicker dimly on edge of that insatiable black hole we call growth capitalism.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/2010-12-06-plugging-the-black-hole-afflicting-the-un-climate-talks-and/feed/0Energy machismo and White House solar panelshttp://grist.org/article/energy-machismo-and-white-house-solar-panels/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/energy-machismo-and-white-house-solar-panels/#commentsTue, 17 Aug 2010 01:45:48 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=39067]]>If there’s one thing you can say about President Obama it’s that he certainly hasn’t given his erstwhile fans on the left a shortage of things to keep scratching their heads over. One of the biggest perennial question marks hanging over his administration has been his failure to lead on clean energy – and not just politically by working a bill, but symbolically by finally fitting the White House with new solar panels to replace the ones that Carter put up and Reagan took down. Of course, while he may be able to blame congressional politics for his lack of follow-through on the policy side of things, there really doesn’t seem to be any clear excuse for his symbolic failure. Why wouldn’t he put solar on his roof? Sure, he hasn’t done much to promote a solar tech revolution, but he certainly likes to talk the stuff up, and he’s has never shied away from doing a photo op at a PV manufacturing plant. So what gives?

Well, for one possible answer let me take you back to a simpler time. The year was 2008, the Democrats had already initiated their retreat on offshore drilling policy, and a stupidly grinning Rudolph Giuliani stood at the podium at the Republican National Convention and uttered the words that would go down as one of the most memorable and moronic political catchphrases of all time – “drill, baby, drill”! The crowd as you may recall reacted with all the bawdy, hootin-and-hollerin enthusiasm of a Jerry Springer audience watching a guest take her top off.

The sexual connotation of the phrase was definitely not an accident. “Drill, baby, drill” was much more than a juvenile campaign slogan. It was a pretty explicit effort to genderize energy politics. It succinctly described the Republican Party’s perspective on energy production as an inherently macho, dominant activity. For the most part, Republicans tend to see energy as something that should be obtained by brute force – by blowing up mountains, by drilling, or better yet by “extreme” drilling: in the arctic, a mile below the ocean’s surface, in the middle of a war-torn country. That, according to the GOP, is how powerful leaders and powerful countries get their energy; not by passively waiting for the wind to blow or the sun to shine. Only liberal wimps would do that. It even explains why their preferred carbon-free form of energy is nuclear – atoms are after all the most powerfully destructive force we’ve ever gotten our hands on, and the possibility of meltdowns only make things more hardcore.

Seen from this perspective, Reagan’s decision to rip Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House makes a lot more sense. From Reagan’s point of view, the oil crisis had made America go all soft on energy policy and he was going to change that. Desolarizing the White House wasn’t just a financial decision; it was a powerfully symbolic act. It was Reagan’s way of saying “look out world, the big guns are back in the House now – there’ll be no more passive reception of energy under my watch. We’re going to flex our geopolitical muscles and go out and take all the energy we need by force, if necessary.”

And herein may lay the true secret to Obama’s reluctance on the solar panels. There’s a good chance he’s just worried that if he goes solar, Fox News and the GOP leadership will try to pin him with their tired caricature of Carter: a weak one-termer who doesn’t have the macho, rigid, unyielding, unthinking, world dominating resolve that Republicans so pride themselves on.

Well sorry to break it to you Mr. President, but the right is already doing that anyway. And you’re not going to escape the sophomoric taunting by trying to hide from the bullies. You deal with bullies by standing up to them. You’ve got to be ready with some snappy comebacks to shut those morons down: tell them that real leaders approach energy policy with their brains, not with their drill bits. Tell them that powerful countries don’t have to abuse their Mother, or steal their children’s future to get their energy. Use your own bully pulpit to let everyone know that despite all their drill-baby-drill macho posturing conservatives are just covering up for their impotent energy platform.

Putting those solar panels back on the White House and making a big show of it would be a good way to get started. Hold a press conference up on the White House roof in front of a glistening array of ready-to-be installed solar panels. Tell the nation that you’re ready to really get to work on clean energy and climate change, then roll up your sleeves for the cameras and help fit a panel in place. Heck, as an added up-yours to the conservative hecklers, bring President Carter along – show them that you’re not afraid to stand beside him, or to stand behind his prescient approach to energy policy.

And if you do it this October 10th – the day of 350.org’s Global Work Party – a coalition of more than a dozen fantastic organizations from the DC area will be there to get your back. We’re already planning on showing up at your place that day with a gift of solar panels, and we’ve already invited President Carter. All you have to do is join us to show the bullies you’re not going to take it anymore.

Of course, once you’ve gotten to work symbolically, you’ll have to get to work for real – championing strong climate policies. But taking a tough, principled stance on energy has got to start with the solar panels. Carter knew it. Regan knew it. It’s high time you figured it out too. Because if you can’t even mange symbolic energy leadership, it’s hard to imagine where you’ll ever find the courage to lead on the issue for real.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/energy-machismo-and-white-house-solar-panels/feed/0Death by Growth: what the climate-bill autopsies missedhttp://grist.org/article/death-by-growth-what-the-climate-bill-autopsies-missed/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/death-by-growth-what-the-climate-bill-autopsies-missed/#commentsFri, 13 Aug 2010 20:17:13 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=39030]]>By now the corpse of the climate bill has been so thoroughly autopsied, that examining it any further seems almost inhumane. A whole army of coroners have weighed in, suggesting an array of possible causes of death: Republican obstructionism, failed presidential leadership, a weak climate movement, the wrong policy approach, the recession.

Each one of these problems no doubt played a role in finishing the bill off. But ultimately they weren’t much more than complications associated with the real killer – the disease which for all their poking around, the coroners somehow managed to miss.

It’s the killer that shall not be named. The killer the coroners don’t see because they don’t want to see it, even though it’s almost impossible to miss. It’s the biggest force in politics. It’s the top issue in almost every election, and especially this one. It’s mentioned in every stump speech. Top world leaders meet several times a year to discuss how to promote it.

It’s the economy stupid. And, no, not the recession. Not the lack of growth, but growth itself. Or, rather, the government’s unwavering devotion to advancing it. I’m not going to spill any ink here explaining how the paradigm of unending growth is incompatible with preserving life, prosperity and security on a finite planet. Far more authoritative voices such has Bill McKibben and Gus Speth have already articulated that argument far more eloquently than I could. But for the purposes of doing a proper postmortem on the climate bill it needs to be said that as long as growth remains the number one priority of governments worldwide any effort to by those governments to seriously address climate change will be doomed to end in failure.

And, of course, growth is without a doubt our government’s top priority, as its kneejerk reaction to the financial crisis makes abundantly clear. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek put it best in his book First as Tragedy then as Farce:

With the financial meltdown the urgency to act was unconditional; sums of unimaginable magnitude had to be found immediately. Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, saving AIDS patients and those dying for lack of funds for special treatments, saving starving children…all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast is an unconditional imperative which must be met with immediate attention.

And forget about “green growth”. That’s the biggest oxymoron since “clean coal”. Sure with efficiency and clean energy we can create less pollution per unit of economic output. But getting to the point where we can even maintain our current economic output without cooking the planet will already be an economic and technical challenge of incredible proportions; never mind trying to fuel an economy twice as big.

The government’s devotion to economic growth entails a devotion to the ultimate drivers of economic growth: corporations. And passing a carbon cap or a carbon tax means going up against the biggest, baddest corporations in the history of corporations: fossil fuel companies. Their formidability lies not just in the fact that they have tons of money to buy political favor but that they constitute the very life blood of the growth based economy; they literally and figuratively fuel the engine of growth. They are the holiest of holies in the corporate temple. Smiting them means smiting the entire growth model; it means blaspheming the Gods of Growth.

In short, the fossil fuel industry is not just another powerful special interest; it is arguably the greatest power in history, backed by enormous wealth, profound dogma, and the power of the global political system. It quite literally is the world order. Displacing it isn’t a matter of piecemeal reformation, but wholesale transformation – in other-words, a revolution.

Wow, okay, so we need a revolution. So how exactly does that help those of us trying to fight climate change? Well, for starters, it could help us avoid wasting energy on incremental reform. By understanding that our federal government may very well be systemically incapable of delivering real reform, we can redirect ourselves towards a more fundamental goal: changing the system; transformation, not reformation. A clean-energy revolution needs to be just that – a real revolution. The founding fathers didn’t get us from monarchy to democracy with baby steps. Accomplishing that change required a giant leap.

And what this means is that despite all of our political instincts, despite all of the wise counsel of pollsters and PR gurus, we have to take the ultimate leap and start directly campaigning against the global religion, economic growth itself – the myth upon which the power of the fossil fuel gods thrive. Kill the myths, kill the dogma, and the gods die with them.

Sound crazy? Not really. Mindbogglingly audacious maybe, but not crazy. It’s certainly no crazier than concluding that to address the symptoms of an illness, you’ve got to find a cure, not just fight the symptoms. Climate change is after all a symptom of our economic philosophy. That’s not to say we shouldn’t work to alleviate that symptom. Good progress on that front is still desirable. But ultimately it won’t save the patient. It won’t save our planet and our civilization. To do that we have to find a cure, and that requires diverting real time and resources from treating the symptom.

And fighting the growth disease might be easier than we think. In fact it might be easier to mobilize people to fight it than to fight the climate symptom. That’s because the economy and its impacts are much more visible, much more present and deeply felt in most people’s everyday lives than the climate crisis and its impacts. It has often been said that the lack of immediacy is the climate movement’s major handicap. The economic crisis we just faced certainly didn’t lack immediacy. There’s nothing more immediate than losing your house, your job, your livelihood, as so many did when the housing bubble burst.

Moreover, people weren’t oblivious to the fact that the crisis was caused by a bubble – by unsustainable growth in a certain sector of the economy. Public confidence in our economic model has already been shaken. To help precipitate its collapse, we need to start connecting the dots between the housing bubble and the much larger bubble that’s bound to burst when it collides in the very near future with the very sharp reality of a devastated planet.

Of course to get people to disavow a dogma as strong as the growth dogma, we have to do much more than shake their confidence in it. We have to offer them an alternative paradigm that provides what the growth dogma promised but was never really designed to deliver on: true, abiding, globally shared prosperity. An economic system that focuses not on growing G
DP, but on growing the things that matter: security, opportunity, education, health, happiness, community, democracy. An alternative that transcends the old false dichotomy between capitalism and command-and-control communism. It’s a model top economists have been developing for years, but whose brilliance has long been obscured by the mirage of endless growth. It’s called the steady-state economy.

As defined by the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy (CASSE), a steady-state economy is one “with stable or mildly fluctuating size…[which] may not exceed ecological limits.” In other words it’s an economy that’s perfectly suited to a world beset by the bursting bubbles and ecological crises of uneconomic growth. It’s the only economy compatible with real climate solutions.

No wonder then that some of the world’s top climate advocates including Bill McKibben, Eban Goodstein, Paul Hawken, Wendel Berry and Gus Speth have endorsed the CASSE platform. But it is a wonder more have not. The steady-state economy is the cure for what killed the climate bill, and what’s killing our civilization. It’s the revolution we need. If we want to bring the world back from the brink, we’d all better start campaigning for it.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/death-by-growth-what-the-climate-bill-autopsies-missed/feed/0Good news for deepwater-oil junkieshttp://grist.org/article/kicking-the-deepwater-oil-habit-and-growing-jobs/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/kicking-the-deepwater-oil-habit-and-growing-jobs/#commentsFri, 02 Jul 2010 10:12:49 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=38174]]>We’ve all heard that we’re addicted to oil. But in the wake of the BP spill we might do well to take the oil-as-a-drug metaphor a little more seriously. For starters we need to understand that deepwater oil is the really bad stuff, the petrochemical heroin – high risk, costly, deadly. Sooner or later we were bound to OD. And unless we quit it immediately we’ll OD again.

Of course kicking the offshore-oil habit will shed some jobs from the economy. Fortunately, though, with the right policies we can quit deepwater oil and actually grow new, better jobs to replace them.

That’s a story some opponents of the Obama Administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium don’t want us to hear. Just consider Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s recent tirade in which he called the moratorium an “economic calamity” that has jeopardized thousands of jobs. That’s right; according to Jindal it was the moratorium that resulted in the economic calamity, not the oil spill that necessitated the moratorium. In other words, the problem is industry regulation, not the lack thereof. That’s the same wrongheaded thinking that got us into this mess, but Jindal’s flawed logic doesn’t end there. More problematic is the premise of his argument: that the people of Louisiana have no future beyond oil, that everyone has to accept the risks of deepwater drilling to keep the economy going. It’s a strain of logic that really shows more contempt than support for working families.

Economic justice for the Gulf coast means a lot more than the availability of jobs. It means the availability of sustainable jobs in sustainable industries that will always support and never imperil the health of communities, economies and the environment. The people of the gulf deserve an economy that does not necessitate the acceptance of unacceptable risks in order to get people paid.

Switching to a green economy won’t be easy for an oil state like Louisiana, but it is possible. The 2009 PERI report for example estimated that the clean energy bill passed by the House last year could result in a net gain of 30,000 green jobs for Louisiana. That’s good news for us oil junkies, and good news for the gulf coast. With congressional action we can kick the deepwater habit, and end up with more jobs than we had before.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/kicking-the-deepwater-oil-habit-and-growing-jobs/feed/0Behind Obama's Speech: a stale strategy and a value vacuumhttp://grist.org/article/paging-dr-lakoff/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/paging-dr-lakoff/#commentsFri, 18 Jun 2010 02:47:49 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=37831]]>If in the wake of the President’s flaccid oval office speech there are still any doubts lingering in anyone’s mind about whether the administration is planning to use the spill as a chance to unleash a game-changing energy policy strategy, a recent DNC oil-spill messaging briefing should put them to rest.

The report, compiled by pollster Joel Benenson and the League of Conservation voters, shows an unequivocal voter tilt in favor of policies and politicians that support a shift towards clean energy and outlines an energy-messaging strategy the authors claim will help those policies and politicians win votes in the coming months. The “pillars” of that strategy, along with their “key dimensions” are:

FRAME THE OPPOSITION

Big Oil and corporate polluters who have blocked energy reform for decades

Politicians protecting the special interests that fund their campaigns

$1 billion a day on foreign oil, oil spill destroying jobs and livelihoods

TAP INTO DEEPLY HELD VALUES

Put America back in control of our energy situation:

Cut foreign oil spending in half

Invest in energy that’s made in America and creates millions of jobs for Americans

If, as Politico’s Mike Allen suggests, this briefing is the kind of thing the White House is using to shape its energy strategy, it’s no surprise that we were underwhelmed by the president’s speech the other night. While the oil spill may represent a potential turning point in US energy policy, the Benenson approach certainly doesn’t represent anything close to a potential turning point on energy policy messaging. Except for the bit about the “oil spill destroying lives and livelihoods” there is absolutely nothing in this messaging that politicians haven’t been saying for years. We’ve heard all about those big oil baddies and their buddies in Congress who have “blocked energy reform for decades” and kept us all dangerously dependent upon fossil fuels. And yet here we are with a stalled Senate clean-energy bill, a quickly changing climate and a Gulf full of oil.

Of course where this messaging really fails big time is on the “deeply held values” front. To win a policy debate it’s not enough to tap into values unless you tap into them in a way that gives you a rhetorical advantage over your opponent. But it’s hard to see how Benenson’s effort to tap values like independence or patriotism differs noticeably from the GOP approach. Sure, switching to clean energy would “put Americans back in control of our energy situation” and “cut foreign oil spending”; but according to Republicans so would expanded off shore drilling and mountain-top-removal mining. So where’s the rhetorical advantage?

It’s no surprise though that the value pillar should be the weakest of the three. The tendency to put far too much trust in the polls and far too little trust in their core progressive values, has always been the Achilles heel of progressive leaders like the President. This kind maddening political calculus is undoubtedly what informed the decision to turn the President’s speech into a hollow piece of rhetorical posturing, and it’s exactly the kind of political calculus that will prevent the President and his allies in Congress from passing any really meaningful climate and clean energy policies. Only by turning away from the pollsters and back to his core progressive values like empathy, as George Lakoff brilliantly argued recently, will the President find the political and moral strength he needs to successfully lead the country out of the oil- spill and climate crises and into a clean energy future.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/paging-dr-lakoff/feed/0Why BP is a textbook psychopathhttp://grist.org/article/why-bp-is-a-textbook-pyschopath/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/why-bp-is-a-textbook-pyschopath/#commentsThu, 03 Jun 2010 23:23:58 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/why-bp-is-a-textbook-pyschopath/]]>It’s good to know that a full six-plus weeks after the BP rig explosion killed 11 workers and initiated the slow painful murder of the Gulf Coast economy and ecology, our ever-watchful federal government has decided to launch an investigation into whether BP actually did something criminal. Thanks for jumping on this, Uncle Sam.

Of course, regardless of how the investigation pans out, it seems that “criminal” may not end up being the right word to describe BP. That term doesn’t fully or accurately encapsulate the truly frightening nature of this corporation and its behavior. Turning to criminology for a little lexical help, we find a much more accurate term for BP’s behavior: psychopathic.

In the 2003 documentary The Corporation, psychologist and FBI criminal profiler Dr. Robert Hare described how corporate behavior neatly corresponds with a whole checklist of characteristics the World Health Organization uses to define psychopathic personalities. Those characteristics include:

Recognizing that corporations like BP or Massey Coal are dangerous psychopaths is much more than a fun pastime for staunch environmentalists and anti-corporatists; that recognition is critical to empowering our criminal justice and political systems to determine how best to punish BP for its crimes, and more importantly, to how to address the underlying pathology which, if left uncorrected, will only lead to the commission of more crimes in the future.

In other words, fining BP billions of dollars for the Deepwater tragedy won’t be enough to stop it from committing similar crimes down the road because criminality is built into the corporation’s very nature. Protecting our society from this psychopath (and others like it) requires taking measures to directly address and correct the corporate-psychopathic tendencies listed above, measures such as rolling back limited liability, or ending shareholder primacy — whatever could stem the tendency to put short-term profitability above all else.

Of course when it takes the feds six weeks to decide that it might be worth sending investigators to poke around one of the worst environmental crime scenes in history, it may be a little more than wishful thinking to imagine the incident could motivate the government to take on anything as serious as corporate reform.

After all, this is an election year, and everyone knows that psychopaths make great campaign contributions.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/why-bp-is-a-textbook-pyschopath/feed/0bp_oil_spill_twitter_logo180x150.jpgTea Party helps pass carbon taxhttp://grist.org/article/tea-party-helps-pass-carbon-tax/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/tea-party-helps-pass-carbon-tax/#commentsSat, 22 May 2010 02:22:18 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/tea-party-helps-pass-carbon-tax/]]>Maryland’s Montgomery County Council passed the nation’s first county-level carbon tax on Wednesday thanks in part to a little heckling from a group of rowdy Tea Party protesters.

It would be hard to dream up a more delightful twist to cap off a campaign that was about as dramatic as they come in the world of county politics. Desperate to prevent what they rightly saw as a precedent that could unleash an avalanche of similar laws across the country, the Mirant Corporation — owners of the big coal plant that was facing the $15 million tax — spared no expense in their efforts to kill the bill. They ran an all-out astroturf campaign that was about as dirty as the energy they produce — outrageously mischaracterizing the bill as anti-environmental, and setting up a website that is known to have generated at least one fraudulent email.

Local climate activists with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and other groups responded with a salvo of real, unpurchased and unmanufactured grassroots emails, petitions, and phone calls to the councilmembers, but right up to the key council subcommittee vote on Tuesday, there was a serious concern that Mirant’s underhanded tactics might win the day.

That concern nearly turned to panic when we arrived at the bill hearing on Tuesday to find the room packed with a mob of global-warming-denying Mirant employees and Tea Party activists the polluters had trotted out in hopes of delivering the knockout punch.

They outnumbered us five to one, and they wasted no time turning the hearing into scene reminiscent of August’s infamous healthcare town-hall meetings — with members of the audience booing and heckling the councilmembers and those testifying in favor of the bill, including Chesapeake Climate Action Network director Mike Tidwell. It was a circus of ignorance and incivility like nothing I’d ever experienced, and presiding over it all were the Mirant executives whose testimony echoed the boldfaced disrespect of their cheering section, mocking councilmember Roger Berliner’s bill as “anti-environmental” and “more sound bite than sound policy.”

Fortunately, the councilmembers found the spectacle that Mirant put on as disgusting as we did, and following a verbal smackdown from councilmembers Berliner and George Leventhal, councilmember Duchy Trachtenberg let Mirant and the Tea Party protesters know just how badly their uncivil tactics had backfired: “I’m afraid your testimony and your presence here today have had the opposite effect of what you intended,” she told them just before asking to be added as a co-sponsor of the bill. Her decision put the vote count over the top, and soon thereafter the committee voted unanimously in favor of the bill. The bill passed the entire county council the next day in an 8-1 vote.

The only thing better than watching a big energy baddy like Mirant go down in flames is watching them get taken down thanks in part to a colossal backfire of teabagger fury. Against the ugly backdrop of the Mirant campaign, the honest, civilized tactics of Montgomery county climate activists — those hundreds of real grassroots phonecalls, emails, and petitions — stood out in even sharper relief and rightfully won the day.

It was a real vindication. Thanks for the boost Tea Partiers. Keep it up.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/tea-party-helps-pass-carbon-tax/feed/0teabag_180.jpgHow environmental groups are protesting the oil spillhttp://grist.org/article/how-environmental-groups-are-protesting-the-oil-spill/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/how-environmental-groups-are-protesting-the-oil-spill/#commentsTue, 11 May 2010 05:23:31 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=36948]]>Since the scale of the BP catastrophe began to register, there have been a lot of questions swirling around the political implications of the spill. Will it help or hinder efforts to pass a climate bill? Should environmentalists seize upon the opportunity to galvanize public support like never before behind an aggressive shift towards clean energy, or should they avoid calls for a drilling moratorium?

For their part, more than a few environmental groups have understandably chosen the former option, and have sprung into action mobilizing supporters behind a flurry of new campaigns. Here’s a sampling of some of the various campaigns that are unfolding across the country:

Virginia

In Virginia, hoping to encourage Gov. Bob McDonnell to join the ranks of his peers Gov. Arnold Schwartzeneger (R-Cal.) and Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.), the Chesapeake Climate Action Network has launched the “Windmills, Not Oil Spills” campaign. The campaign kicked off last week with a press conference around a mock oil spill on Virginia Beach, and organizers hope to collect 10,000 signatures on a petition urging Governor McDonnell to tap Virginia’s significant offshore wind potential instead of the outer-continental shelf.

Florida

The Florida based “Hands Across the Sand” campaign has been going full bore against offshore drilling since February but following the spill organizers have stepped up plans to take their show on the road to other coastal states in the coming months. The organizers are calling all beach loving citizens to join hands with them as they take a stand against oil on the sands of Virginia Beach this June 26th.

Louisiana & DC

As if they weren’t busy enough organizing their 10/10 Global Work Party, the 350 campaign joined the Sierra Club for a rally in New Orleans this past Saturday and the group has another major rally scheduled to take place in Washington DC tomorrow, Tuesday May 11th. The DC “Crude Awakening” action will feature a march from the Interior Department to the White House where participants will deliver a banner that reads OBAMA: THIS IS YOUR CRUDE AWAKENING.

Nationally

Through May 16th the Sierra Club is organizing a Series of “Clean It Up” demonstrations in communities all over the US. The Club is calling on activists to host mock oil spill events like the one in Virginia Beach, or to rally outside of BP stations.

Finally, though not technically an environmental organization, the Answer Coalition, is planning a series of nationwide demonstrations this Wednesday calling for a seizure of BP’s assets to help pay for the environmental and economic damage.

More to come…

Whether the gulf spill turns out to be the Three Mile Island of oil politics or not, as this first wave of protests makes clear, the environmental community has no plans to stand by flat footed as this crisis continues to unfold. Watch this space for more updates.

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/article/how-environmental-groups-are-protesting-the-oil-spill/feed/0Against a torrent of oil, a trickle of responsibilityhttp://grist.org/article/against-a-torrent-of-oil-a-trickle-of-responsibility/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/against-a-torrent-of-oil-a-trickle-of-responsibility/#commentsWed, 05 May 2010 01:02:24 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/against-a-torrent-of-oil-a-trickle-of-responsibility/]]>Of the many things lacking in the response to the BP spill, responsibility ranks pretty high on the list. From President Obama’s reluctance to reverse his decision to expand offshore drilling, to BP’s shameless attempts to play the innocent victim card, and the far right’s attempts to pin the blame on environmentalists, responsible words and actions have been in short supply.

So it’s been refreshing to see at least some high-profile public figures attempting to reverse that trend.

In what could be the first inklings of a mounting wave of political push back against the reckless drill-baby-drill mentality, several political leaders from coastal states including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) and six U.S. senators, have spoken out in defense of their states’ coastlines and common sense by calling on Obama to reverse his offshore drilling decision.

The senators included Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who, as I noted in an earlier post, wrote a letter [PDF] to Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in March calling on the three to keep offshore drilling out of the climate bill they were working on. That letter was unfortunately ignored, but now the senators have a more visible platform from which to trumpet their concerns, and it’s good to see that they are using it.

Even still, much more is needed. Despite recognizing the unacceptable risks posed by a cavalier policy toward offshore drilling, the senators stopped short of recognizing the unacceptable risks posed by our oil dependence as a whole. Instead they reiterated Obama’s claim “that domestic oil production is an important part of our overall strategy for energy security,” adding that “it must be done responsibly, for the safety of our workers and our environment.”

“Responsibility,” “safety,” and “energy security” are not terms that should be used in the same sentence as the phrase “oil production,” unless juxtaposed against it. Given the threats of climate change, peak oil, and the thousands of oil-related air pollution deaths that occur every year, it’s hard to see how any policy except a policy to aggressively shift us away from the use of oil could possibly be considered responsible with respect to the safety of our workers, the general public, our environment, or our energy security.

As Grist’s Jonathan Hiskes pointed out last week, there may never be a better opportunity for our political leaders to make this case to the public. We have to demand that they do so. It’s the only responsible thing to do.

In the letter, the senators warned about the serious threats such drilling posed to their states’ coastlines:

While technological advances have attempted to lower the environmental and economic risks of drilling, experience has shown that no technology is foolproof. Since 1964 offshore operators have had 40 spills of greater than 42,000 gallons … Far from being a thing of the past spills occur with alarming frequency … Drilling near our coasts poses a severe risk to our states’ coastlines and in turn to our coastal communities.

As up to 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) of crude oil a day rise from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig and make their way toward the Louisiana coast, the concerns expressed in that letter look more prescient than ever. As this spill drives home with frightening clarity, offshore oil drilling remains a dirty and catastrophically dangerous business — despite cynical and self-serving claims from Washington and the oil industry. The type of nightmare the senators warned of has tragically come to pass once again, with 11 workers killed and disastrous consequences for communities and ecosystems along a coastline already beset by the destructive forces unleashed by the burning of fossil fuels.

The incident also highlights the major flaws of the KGL approach to climate policy making. In order to build support for a bill that is supposed to protect the climate, they’ve had to give away the store to the very dirty energy interests whose products are destroying it. In order to stop the damage being done by fossil fuels, the senators are pushing for an expansion of their production. If it sounds kind of crazy, that’s because it is.

While it may be difficult and distasteful to see anything positive in a tragedy like this, the truth is this inevitable disaster couldn’t have happened at a more politically critical time — just as lawmakers were moving to codify the condemnation of our coastlines. In the same way that the Big Branch mining disaster caused elected officials to take a hard look at mining safety, one can only hope that the Deepwater Horizon spill will serve as the powerful wake-up call the president and Congress need to reverse the foolhardy course they have chosen regarding offshore drilling.

To make sure this happens, we need our coastal-state senators to be the voice of reason once again, and reiterate their critique of the unreason of the KGL-Obama approach to climate policy:

… we cannot support legislation that will mitigate one risk only to put our coasts at greater peril from another source.

Perhaps now there’s a chance the president and the Senate leadership will actually listen.

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Politics]]>http://grist.org/article/tragic-oil-spill-smarter-climate-bill/feed/0State of the Climate Movement: Can fasting and asceticism save the world?http://grist.org/article/state-of-the-climate-movement-can-fasting-and-ascetism-save-the-world/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/state-of-the-climate-movement-can-fasting-and-ascetism-save-the-world/#commentsMon, 30 Nov 2009 08:58:23 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/state-of-the-climate-movement-can-fasting-and-ascetism-save-the-world/]]>Despite all the doubts surrounding Copenhagen’s political outcomes, global climate activists can take heart in the fact that the conference may result in the next best thing to a binding climate treaty: a smarter, more galvanized, and re-energized global grassroots climate movement.

More than a mere geographical convergence point for our movement, Copenhagen has already proved itself an important philosophical and sociological convergence point as well, inspiring climate activists around the globe to come together like never before behind powerful new ideas and campaigns. And I’m not just talking about 350.

Here’s a look at few of the more notable global grassroots efforts to emerge around COP 15 and a quick analysis of what they mean for the current state and future of the climate movement:

The Fast Track to Climate Action

The idea of making sacrifices for the climate has certainly never been a mainstay of the mainstream climate movement. Cowed by conservative framing and fearful of alienating comfort-loving Americans, mainstream climate campaigners have done a pretty impeccable job of keeping the word out of their messaging and off their lips. Nevertheless, in recent months, many segments of the true grassroots climate movement have found their liberal backbones and started latching on to the idea of sacrifice as a mobilizing tool, and the results have been pretty refreshing and inspiring.

On the very front lines of this emerging sacrificial vanguard are the participants of the Climate Justice Fast. The brain child of Australian students, the Climate Justice Fast kicked off on Nov. 6, and has since become an international phenomenon, involving around 100 fasters in 23 countries. Tracing their lineage to the great hunger strikers of the past including Gandhi and Terence MacSwiney, Climate Justice fasters have described their campaign as a “deeply moral form of political protest, demonstrating through our personal sacrifice that we are willing to make deep personal change.”

And the participants of the climate justice fast aren’t going to be contented to let their sacrifices transpire in private, unseen by politicians and government negotiators who need to hear their message.Like their famous forbearers, the fasters are using their fasting for a very pointedly strategic political purpose. The fast will continue through the end of the climate negotiations in Copenhagen and several of the strikers will actually be present at the conference to act, in faster Ted Glick’s words “as visible evidence of what the climate crisis is all about,” – that it’s a very real and urgent matter of life and death for many in our global community.

Indeed built into the ethos of the Climate Justice Fast is an understanding that the urgency of the climate crisis requires a fresher, more radical form of activism than the mainstream climate movement has served up so far. According to the CJF website “Traditional methods of protest, such as marches, petitions, and direct actions, all lack the power to communicate the importance of the climate issue.” In other words such soft core tactics are all too easily ignored by politicians, and don’t have the emotional energy needed to inspire new activists and build a powerful movement around. Something much more visceral is needed to really open eyes and move hearts to action. Fasting is one such tactic.

Unplugged but fully charged in Massachusetts

Another tactic with a similar sacrificial theme has recently burst on to the grassroots climate scene in Massachusetts via the student led Mass Leadership Campaign. While the Climate Justice Fasters have been depriving themselves of food as a way of demonstrating their solidarity with future generations and the global poor, the participants of the Mass Leadership Campaign have been working towards the same end by depriving themselves of the trappings of modern domesticity. Launched the day after the 350 International Day of Climate Action the campaign has seen hundreds of mostly student climate activists forgo the electricity, heat and other creature comforts of their dorms and homes to live outdoors in tents on their campuses and the Boston common for nights and in some cases even weeks. In addition to drawing attention to the reality of climate refugees who will have no choice but to leave their homes and live without basic necessities, the Leadership Campaign has the very locally focused political goal of persuading the Massachusetts legislature to pass a law that would put the state on track to 100 percent renewable energy by 2020. Faced with the Hobson’s choice of living a lifestyle fueled by dirty energy, or unplugging from the grid completely, the Mass leaders have chosen the latter, and have vowed to continue to do so until the their political leaders accede to their demands.

Adding to the Gandhian overtones of their campaign, the Mass leadership electricity fasters have also added an element of civil disobedience to their efforts, by pitching their tents on the Boston common in contravention of city ordinances. It is a testament to the tactical brilliance and inspirational power of this move that to date hundreds of people, including climate luminaries such as James Hanson and Bill McKibben, have participated in the Boston Common sleep outs and broken the law and received police citations together in the name of climate justice. By the time the Boston Common phase of the sleep out campaign wraps up on Sunday, Dec. 6 — the day before the start of the Copenhagen conference — hundreds more will have participated, and the campaign will have built the necessary momentum to inspire continued sleep outs in towns and campuses across Massachusetts, and hopefully, in time, across the whole country.

Rewriting the grassroots climate action playbook

Together, the Climate Justice Fast and the Mass Leadership campaign constitute the first few inspiring glimpses into the content of a new tactical playbook that will be vital to taking the global climate movement to the next level. The real promise and power of these tactics derives from the fact that they reflect a deep understanding of an important aspect of human psychology that the mainstream climate movement has thus far ignored in its flight away from sacrifice — namely that people more readily act to prevent losses than to achieve gains. Thus even though we need a positive vision of a clean energy vision to orient people toward, when people are already living in relative comfort as they do in the United States it’s hard to motivate them with visions of a “better world.” As I’ve written here before, one of the biggest shortcomings of the American climate movement is that most American climate activists understand the difficulties of the climate crisis on a mostly intellectual level. Without any kind of visceral connection to the climate crisis, we are simply unable to summon the kind of emotional and moral energy needed to power the push for lasting solutions to the crisis. Tactics like fasting and the Mass Leadership campouts are perhaps the only thing short of real climate disasters that will help us develop those visceral connections, and as such one can only hope that they will begin to be more widely deployed so that more people can appreciate what exactly we have to lose and stand up to protect it before it is really lost.

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/state-of-the-climate-movement-can-fasting-and-ascetism-save-the-world/feed/0Why the climate movement needs more Ethiopian-style activistshttp://grist.org/article/why-the-american-climate-movement-needs-ethiopians/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/why-the-american-climate-movement-needs-ethiopians/#commentsWed, 04 Nov 2009 04:35:47 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/why-the-american-climate-movement-needs-ethiopians/]]>Of all the amazing stories that emerged from last month’s historic International Day of Climate Action, the one that really caught my eye (and made my jaw drop in disbelief and admiration) was that of 15,000 Ethiopian students swarming though the streets of Addis Ababa brandishing 350 signs and whooping it up big time in support of bold global climate solutions.

If you haven’t seen the video yet, check it out. It’s definitely something to behold.

Less jaw-dropping was the turnout at our action in D.C. which topped out at less than a thousand. Considering the massive outreach and buzz-building effort my fellow organizers and I invested in the event, that number should have been much closer to what they got in Addis Ababa. But somehow we didn’t even come close. So what exactly did the Ethiopians have going for them that we didn’t?

Sunny weather, sans monsoon-style rain was certainly one factor. But there had to be more to it than that. After all, this was supposed to be the mother of all climate actions, our last big change before Copenhagen, before one of the most vitally important meetings in human history to give our leaders the kind of big grassroots push they need to really do something. With so much at stake how could anyone who cares about this issue have let a little rain keep them away from marching with us? Why wasn’t everyone there?

Roz Savage asked the same question about the turnout at her Oct. 24 rally in London, and she suggested a pretty good answer: global warming is a downer. People just don’t want to think about it. They’ve got enough problems to deal with in their everyday lives. And, you know, she’s absolutely right. The real reason for American activist apathy is that to most Americans, climate change is just another problem — one of a million things to worry about instead of the ultimate crisis. Worse, for most of us it actually sits pretty low on the totem pole of problems. In polls Americans consistently rank the economy, war, and health care well above climate change in the triage of issues to worry about. And this isn’t because people don’t appreciate how serious climate change is. It’s just that we only appreciate it intellectually. We don’t yet feel it in our everyday lives with the same kind of visceral immediacy with which we feel economic or health care problems, and for that reason most people just aren’t ready to take to the streets for it, rain or shine.

Photo courtesy 350.org via Flickr And this brings us back to those kids in Ethiopia. Sunny weather and good organizing aside, I’d wager that what really drove them to the streets was the one thing that the climate movement in America (and most of the industrialized world) is missing: a sense of urgency, a visceral appreciation of the problem. The kind of urgency and visceral appreciation that comes from experience with the kinds of hardships that catastrophic climate change will impose: drought and famine, political, social, and economic instability. Ethiopia’s effort to escape such miseries has been slow and arduous, and the fall back into their grip wouldn’t be very far. The country ranks at 171 out of 182 countries on the U.N. human development index, making it one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to the catastrophic impacts of runaway climate change. Such vulnerability has a way of inspiring serious street stomping action on the scale that we just saw in Addis Ababa.

So does this mean Americans may have to experience a few climate induced disasters like an agricultural collapse or a string of additional Katrinas before our climate movement can reach the kind of scale that we really need right now? Maybe, but I certainly hope not. I hope the movement expands along the lines suggested by my colleague Ted Glick — not as an explosive reaction to a national trauma, but as a kind of outgrowth and blossoming of the many seeds climate activists have been planting recently via the mounting anti-coal demonstrations and big days of action like the 24th. But however that growth occurs, one thing is for certain: if it’s going to have any serious impact on policy in the time frame that we need, it has to happen fast. And to make that happen we’re going to have to somehow quickly shake off our remaining climate complacency and start feeling the kind of visceral urgency that seems to be inspiring the Ethiopian climate movement.

That’s right, America: In order to help save the world, we’ve got to wake up and start thinking and acting a lot more like Ethiopians.

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/why-the-american-climate-movement-needs-ethiopians/feed/0ethiopia_350_flickr_350.org.jpgEthiopian 350 protest. Oct 24, 2009 – Not just a global day of action; a historic turning pointhttp://grist.org/article/oct-24-2009-not-just-a-global-day-of-action-a-historic-turning-point/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_keithharrington
http://grist.org/article/oct-24-2009-not-just-a-global-day-of-action-a-historic-turning-point/#commentsSat, 24 Oct 2009 09:44:16 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/oct-24-2009-not-just-a-global-day-of-action-a-historic-turning-point/]]>Sarah Rifaat via 350.org Flickr Creative CommonsIf you’re still looking for a good reason to venture out and take part in an International Day of Climate Action event on Saturday, try this on for size: the day of action won’t simply be a landmark moment for the global climate movement; it could very well turn out to be a landmark moment in human history. And that’s not an exaggeration.

The truth is, nothing like the International Day of Climate Action has ever happened before. As Bill McKibben just said, with over 4000 events taking place in almost every country in the world, this day will be the most widespread day of global action on any issue in history. That’s no joke, and for that reason I’d also argue that this will be the first truly global event in human history. Not even the Olympics or a world cup final could come close to matching the Day of Climate Action as great global events. Sure they might draw global TV audiences that would dwarf our numbers on this day, but the real measure of a global event lies not in its numbers but in its spirit. And on that score I’d say the Day of Action will beat any Opening Ceremony hands down.

Just consider the context. As the first truly global-scale crisis humanity has ever faced, climate change is forcing us to start perceiving ourselves for the first time as a global community, as a common people facing a common threat. It’s becoming increasingly clear – and especially in the light of the sputtering UN climate process – that solving the climate crisis will require a new brand of international cooperation that transcends the traditional model of individual nations negotiating their way toward a middle ground between their individual interests. What we need now more than ever is action not as a united nations but as a global community. We need action by people and for people, not just by nations and for nations. To transcend this crisis, we need the first truly global grassroots movement – a movement which by its very nature will lead us through a door to a new era of global consciousness, to a transformation not just of the way that we consume energy, but of the way that we perceive ourselves, and our relations and responsibilities to each other.

That’s what October 24 is all about. That’s what this day is the opening ceremony for. And as the first truly global-scale expression of this coming transformative global movement, I think it’s safe to say that the International Day of Climate Action could turn out to be a pretty historically significant moment. Moreover, those of us who participate in it won’t just be helping to usher in a new stage in the global climate movement; we’ll be helping to usher in a new era of human history.

Come snow or rain or heat or gloom, I’d say that’s definitely something to show up for. Do not miss out. Go to www.350.org now to find an action near you.

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/oct-24-2009-not-just-a-global-day-of-action-a-historic-turning-point/feed/0350-pyramids-290x188.jpg350 at the pyramids